Preparation
patrick — Thu, 2012-12-06 05:27
I went from watching The Walking Dead to watching Survivors (from BBC) to watching The Colony (Discovery Channel). Yet another predicted end of the world is supposed to happen this month. Looking back over the last couple of years has already made me think of the great R.E.M. song It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine). The '90s are over, the 2000s are over, it's now the '10s. Survivalism fascinates me (Bear Grylls can suck it, Les Stroud is the man) and looking at the recent disaster of hurricane Sandy I feel the need to join the crowd thumbing my nose at those affected.
Mysterious DLLs
patrick — Tue, 2010-05-18 13:59
I was having an issue on my Windows game box with firefox stating it didn't have the latest version of flash installed. It had also been a couple of days since I had last run firefox and I didn't recall having any pages require a java applet loaded the last time (and today it opened the Java web start). I was also having issues with player controls in firefox on a particular site and games were crashing so it was time to reboot my computer. After I logged in up popped a window for flash stating that it was ready to finish installing the latest version of flash.
From Wordpress Back to Drupal
patrick — Fri, 2010-05-14 14:18
After several years of using Wordpress I switched my blog back to Drupal. There's several reasons for this, but some of the more important issues, to me anyway, included being able to easily do certain things like add external links to my "Pages" section. The only 2 ways I could figure out how to do it with Wordpress was to either a) hack the theme or b) make fake pages and then use Apache redirects to forward the URL to the real link. I also wanted to be able to quickly add a link or other content without it cluttering up the blog posts or forcing it onto every single page under the blogroll.
I was also having issues adding a blog post which I thought might be due to a broken Wordpress installation, but I later discovered was actually due to an Apache security module preventing me from mentioning certain file locations (such as /etc/passwd). After I figured that out I was able to break it up with spaces in order to post it, then dug into the database in order to fix it... In several places as Wordpress kept multiple broken versions of the post and I wasn't sure which version needed fixing.
Server Security and SSH
patrick — Wed, 2008-03-26 13:38
I was in the phpc IRC channel on freenode the other day when somebody posted a link to My Server has been Hacked. I suggested he switch an option in the SSH server options to require the person attempting a login to have a key. Hopefully he's done this by now.
Most people that deal with remote servers are usually familiar with FTP and/or Telnet. These are both pretty old technologies and were designed prior to the hostile environment that the internet has evolved into. Considering all the security issues around I can't believe that web hosting companies continue to use it and won't allow customers encrypted alternatives!
Basically telnet and FTP transfer everything between the user client and the remote server as plain text. This includes username and password for logging in and all the files you upload & download will be transferred visibly bit by naked bit.
McAfee Cries Wolf on Open Source
patrick — Tue, 2006-08-15 19:54
Or better yet, McAfee does it again!
?
Holy Crap Batman! Apparently, according to McAfee, open source development methods are responsible for helping malware authors create better malware... Therefore, I'm assuming, we should then blame open source for all of our malware? That's like almost like blaming everyone that uses the USA's interstate system (or at least those responsible for it's construction) for drug trafficking... So does that mean we need to charge Hitler with drug trafficking?
